I now ask myself, How much did she know? Did she know of Nasser’s pledge – that he would ‘totally exterminate the Jewish state for all time’? Did she know about extermination? Her tiny, witty grandmother, who lived in the family house high up on Finchley Road, was orthodox, to the extent that even her instant coffee, her green-labelled Gold Blend, was stamped Kosher (‘proper’); she knew about extermination. Rachel’s uncle, Uncle Balfour, knew about extermination…
And I, what did I know? Nothing. I was seventeen, and politically detached; more than this, I felt that history couldn’t reach me, somehow, that it couldn’t reach me. Invulnerable to Hitler, thanks to my colouring, I was also an irrelevance to Nasser, for the same reason. Both men might have found me guilty on a lesser charge: I was a Zionist sympathiser and I was a Jew-lover.
And I was. I loved Rachel, of course (as who would not?), but the point is I loved Theo, too, loved him anyway, from early childhood. I loved looking at his eyes, which seemed almost kaleidoscopic, like a mobile above a crib. In his case a living, stirring pattern of all the gentler human impulses. The intelligent gentleness of those eyes.
‘What is it, five hundred millilitres every six weeks? You give so much,’ I said, ‘I keep worrying you’ll disappear. And you don’t eat. Or sleep.’
They were at the bus stop and he had his arms round her middle. ‘You’re so slim anyway. That panty girdle – why d’you wear it?’
‘Because my stomach sticks out.’
‘It doesn’t stick out. It curves forward. It’s beautiful, and I love it.’
They embraced and kissed as the double-decker pulled up with an indulgent sigh.
—————
A theory – floated here with all due diffidence.
The philo-Semite and the anti-Semite do not stand in diametrical opposition, not quite. They are, alike, incapable of responding neutrally to what Bellow has called ‘the Jewish charge’, the stored energy of the Jew. Charge: ‘the property of matter that is responsible for electrical phenomena, existing in a positive or negative form’.
The stored energy, the stored history, existing in a positive or negative form.
*1 By ‘the crap generation’ I meant the one that came after the baby boomers – those born around 1970 (the Generation Xers). I couldn’t be sure, of course, but the generation that came after the crap generation (those born around 1990 – the Millennials) seemed more or less okay…The Crap Generation, as a project, was put out of its misery by Elena. ‘You’re not serious,’ she said. ‘Who do you think’ll review it, fool? Crap sociologists and crap historians and crap critics.’ This stirred my fighting spirit, and I said, ‘Yeah, well, they’ll have to take it on the chin and move on.’ Elena said, ‘Everyone’ll think you’re as bad as Kingsley. And they’ll be right. You’re having one of your dizzy spells. Forget it. The Crap Generation’s a crap idea.’
*2 Updike’s obvious living superiors did not form a numerous company, consisting at the time of Bellow and Nabokov. In his New Yorker reviews Updike was consistently impertinent in his evaluations of Bellow, and in my opinion slackly wayward and off-target in his evaluations of Nabokov (though wonderfully expressive about the prose). Having saluted Bellow’s exuberance and melodiousness, Updike adds, in more or less the same breath: ‘at this point of his career, Bellow has sat atop the American literary heap longer than anyone else since William Dean Howells’. William Dean Howells? This is, and was meant to be, slyly insulting. Unmasked by the passage of time as a bloated mediocrity, Howells lived from 1837 to 1920. In any serious critical sense, the man who sat atop the American literary heap during this period was Henry James (1843–1916)…There’ll be more to say about Updike, and more to say about James.
*3 Oh, and my fifth novel was just a few months away from completion. My first four novels, like all the British novels published in the 1970s and early 1980s, consisted of 225 pages (and took eighteen months to write); my fifth took twice that long and nearly twice that length (it seems that I’d taken a leaf out of Bellow’s book and trusted to voice)…But anyway, the arrival of my fifth novel was about fifth on my roster of imminent amplifications.
*4 I won’t be quoting myself, but I will be repeating myself (in paraphrase). This long novel is almost certainly my last long novel, and some of it – about 1 per cent – has the character of an anthology. Self-plagiarism is not a felony; I would agree, though, that I am open to the charge of authorial misconduct. Much of the time I’m simply relaying necessary information. As for the rest, I’m usually turning again to an unanswered question, one that refuses to leave me alone.
*5 Me, and others too. Having spent time with the Bellows in I think Vermont, Philip Roth (until then a probationary intimate) wrote: ‘Dear Saul: At last you’ve married a woman who understands me. Love, Philip.’
*6 Whose shade, by the way, warily awaits the destiny of William Dean Howells. I was a late developer, and Greene was the first serious writer I ever read; and I revered him, I think, largely for that reason. Forty years later I incredulously revisited Brighton Rock and The End of the Affair, and it became quite clear to me that Greene could hardly hold a pen. His verbal surface is simply dull of ear (a briar patch of rhymes and chimes); and his plots, his narrative arrangements, tend to dissipate into the crassly tendentious (because they’re determined by religion. See below). The Stockholm Prize is adjudicated by a standing committee, so it is less scattershot than some; still, there have been many famous absurdities (and the great Borges said that not giving him the Nobel was ‘an old Scandinavian
